Listen, I’ve been around long enough to know a shakedown when I see one. And between pulls of Jim Beam at 3 AM last night, reading about OpenAI’s latest stunt, I couldn’t help but flash back to that time Joey “The Wrench” explained to me how protection money works. Only difference is, Joey had the courtesy to look you in the eye while he was squeezing you.
Let me paint you a picture through my whiskey-tinted glasses: There’s this small Ukrainian company called Triplegangers, seven honest workers doing honest digital work, selling 3D scans of real humans. Think digital mannequins for the cyber age. They’re minding their own business when suddenly - BAM! - OpenAI’s digital goons come knocking, not with baseball bats but with 600+ bot IPs hammering their servers like it’s a game of digital whack-a-mole.
The poor bastards didn’t even see it coming. Their crime? Not paying proper respect to the new digital dons by updating their robot.txt file. Yeah, you heard that right. In 2025, you gotta pay protection money in the form of specific code telling AI companies’ bots to kindly fuck off.
And the kicker? These AI companies are acting like they’re doing us a favor. “Oh, you can opt out anytime!” they say, while their digital thugs are already ransacking your server room. It’s like a burglar telling you it’s your fault for not having better locks while they’re carrying your TV out the door.
Let me take a smoke break here… lights cigarette
The numbers are staggering, even through my bourbon haze. 65,000 products, each with multiple photos, getting grabbed faster than free drinks at an open bar. AWS bills climbing higher than my bar tab during poetry night at The Rusty Nail. And the company’s CEO, Oleksandr Tomchuk, standing there watching his digital inventory get pillaged like it’s Black Friday in the metaverse.
You know what really chaps my ass about this whole thing? These AI companies are worth billions. BILLIONS. They could afford to pay for this data. Hell, they could probably buy the whole damn company with what they spend on office furniture. But instead, they’re out here acting like digital locusts, stripping small businesses bare and hiding behind terms of service longer than my list of regrets.
The real punch to the gut is how they’re handling people’s actual identities. Triplegangers works with real human models - folks who signed up to be 3D scanned for legitimate business purposes, not to be sucked into some AI’s training data like digital soylent green. But hey, who cares about consent when you’ve got quarterly targets to hit, right?
Research shows AI crawler traffic jumped 86% in 2024. That’s more unwanted visitors than my ex-wife’s Facebook page. And most website owners are sitting there like marks in a rigged game, not even knowing they’re being robbed blind.
Want to know if you’re getting scrapped? Better start monitoring your logs like I monitor my bourbon levels - obsessively and with growing concern. Because unless you’ve got your robot.txt configured just right and your Cloudflare shields up, these digital pickpockets are probably rifling through your site right now.
Here’s the truth, straight no chaser: This isn’t about technology anymore. It’s about power. These companies aren’t innovating; they’re intimidating. They’re not creating; they’re taking. And they’re doing it with all the subtlety of a drunk elephant in a china shop.
Listen, I need another drink to finish this thought, but here’s the bottom line: We’re all living in a protection racket now, only instead of broken windows and mysterious fires, it’s crashed servers and stolen data. And just like the old days, the only way to protect yourself is to pay up - with code instead of cash.
Remember when the internet was supposed to be about sharing knowledge? Yeah, me neither. Pass the bourbon.
Stay cynical, Henry Chinaski
P.S. If any AI bots are scraping this post, I hope you choke on my metaphors.
Source: How OpenAI’s bot crushed this seven-person company’s web site ’like a DDoS attack’